[jbotdev]

Part of my point is the goal with such a system is usually to require less infra work/knowledge from your devs, but it backfires if you don’t invest enough in your abstraction.

The implicit goal of these abstractions is really to central knowledge and best practices around the underlying tech. Kubernetes itself is trying to free developers from understanding server management, but you could argue it’s not worth using directly vs. just teaching your devs how to manage VMs for the vast majority of organizations.

I don’t think you’re ever going to stop more and more layers of abstraction, so the best we can hope for is they’re done well. Otherwise you may as well go back to writing raw ethernet frames in assembly on bare metal.

[zeroCalories]

> Part of my point is the goal with such a system is usually to require less infra work/knowledge from your devs, but it backfires if you don’t invest enough in your abstraction.

I disagree that the solution is to simply build more. Often the best thing to do is accept that devs will need to know a little infra, and work with that assumption.

> The implicit goal of these abstractions is really to central knowledge and best practices around the underlying tech.

I agree with that.

> Kubernetes itself is trying to free developers from understanding server management, but you could argue it’s not worth using directly vs. just teaching your devs how to manage VMs for the vast majority of organizations.

The difference is that spinning up a VM and setting it up to have all the features you would want from k8s would be too much to ask from a dev. You would probably just end up re-creating k8s.

> I don’t think you’re ever going to stop more and more layers of abstraction, so the best we can hope for is they’re done well. Otherwise you may as well go back to writing raw ethernet frames in assembly on bare metal.

The problem is that abstractions are not free, and most of the time they aren't done well. Once in a while you'll get one that reduces(hides) complexity and becomes an industry standard, making it a no-brainer to adopt, but most of your in-house abstractions are just going to make your life worse.

[pm90]

I think the biggest “win” with abstractions is that it makes it easier for infra teams to update underlying concretions (is that a word? the concrete version of the abstraction) without having to dig deep into the codebase.

e.g. with kubernetes, if you have the actual manifests defined by every team, it is a pain to do any sort of k8s updates. With a simple abstraction where teams only define the things they are interested in configuring (eg helm values), that simplifies this task a lot.